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Back in the Middle Ages, which means somewhere in the 1990s, the acronym WWJD was a widely publicized guide to Christian ethics....

“How would your introductory course in your field help prepare students for ministry?” This question consistently stumped candidates fresh from graduate school who were interviewing for a faculty p...

Every time I happen upon Psalm 16:6, “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places,” I think about how any of us comes to be who we are....

A generation ago, Ernest Becker taught us that the fear of dying is the mainspring of all human activity, from our smallest efforts at survival to our loftiest cultural achievements....

In Richard Powers’s novel The Echo Maker, a young man suffers a brain injury in an auto accident and is afflicted with Capgras syndrome....

I saw my father preach the other day. His hair is now white, and the skin on his face has loosened with age, but this is the same man whose face I saw above the pulpit throughout my childhood....

For many years I taught a course titled "The Problem of God." I believed that students should be exposed to the most erudite of the unbelievers, and that any commitment that they might make to a religious faith should be critically tested by the very best opponents. Richard Dawkins, Samuel Harris and Christopher Hitchens would never have made the required reading list. Their tirades reinforce ignorance—not only of religion—but also of atheism.

The opening in July 1998 of the 13th Lambeth Conference of 800 bishop...

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Though not reckoned as a scripture scholar in any conventional sense, Robert Alter has affected the study of the Hebrew Bible in...

Writers of memoirs used to be people who had explored the North Pole or starred in films or run for president; their writing was a final act of s...

On a winter night in 1964, an unexpected blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins....

Rodger Kamenetz’s vividly honest and well-researched book on dreams in Western culture is extraordinary...

There are few tasks more daunting for a filmmaker than straddling the line between comedy and tragedy....

A folk-singing friend taught me that if I could link a sermon to a song, listeners would remember the song, and thus be more likely to remember the sermon....

The texts speak of thirst for life. The people thirst for water in the wilderness. The Samaritan woman at the well meets the One who gives the water of eternal life....

In his recent book The Jesus Way, the unfailingly helpful Eugene Peterson observes: “Community is intricate and complex. Living in community as a people of God is inherently messy....

"Mr. Gorbachev—tear down this wall.” Ronald Reagan’s demand in 1987 regarding the Berlin Wall needed no nuancing....

Match made in heaven? Almost half of American Jews marry gentiles, a rate that has tripled since 1970. But now JDate—a matchmaking Web site for Jewish singles—is teaming up with rabbis to reverse this trend. JDate offers a bulk rate to rabbis who will make subscriptions available to members of their congregations, and some of the rabbis are picking up the tab (Newsweek, January 21).

Over the years, the fiberglass steeple had gradually weakened, and the hot sun and brutal winters had changed it into a streaked and stained obelisk. Its paint was flaking and splintering, its cracks widening. The “case of the stained steeple” went on the council agenda, and the steeple was taken down and carted off to a field just south of the building. The council neglected to decide on its disposal, so there it rested. The grass grew high and the steeple was forgotten—until the day the director of the preschool looked out the window and shouted, “Pastor, we have to do something about that man out there!”